


Paresthesia

by DarlaBlack



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Episode: s08e16 Three Words, Episode: s08e17 Empedocles, Episode: s08e18 Vienen, F/M, Romance, Season/Series 08
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-19
Updated: 2018-10-21
Packaged: 2019-08-04 06:48:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16341857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarlaBlack/pseuds/DarlaBlack
Summary: Mulder returns broken and distant. Here's what he's thinking. Here's how he comes around.





	1. Chapter 1

He has sat with the idea for long nights, contemplating her possible betrayal. She’s gone and done it without him, he thinks. I was dead and she was free to do as she pleased. She must not have waited long, he thinks. He suffers over this endlessly.

She tries to reign him in, to turn even the Gunmen against him, as she has done once before (in another terrible time, a terrible place for them when she would not believe him—she’d been right, then, but he won’t let himself remember that now).  She tries to keep him from work, the very last thing he has left of himself. She doesn’t want to be his partner anymore. She’s found someone else.

Most nights he won’t even turn his lights on, wallowing in the black chill like he is yet in his grave, in the too-preserved tomb of the dead man he was before.

He is a cornered animal and he bites.

Backed to a wall, he nearly draws blood: Skinner this time, who finds him in cold shadows, held in company by only his dead fish.

“I can’t begin to understand,” Skinner says, “what must be going on in your mind. I don’t think anyone on this earth can.” Then: a fierceness in his jaw, a protectiveness Mulder used to know in himself. “But what the fuck are you doing? Why are you punishing her?”

The rumble of animal rage. A snarl. “I’m not punishing her.”

Skinner glares at him. They are millimeters from a brawl—it has happened before.

“You have no clue,” Skinner says. “No clue.” The man’s fists are clenched and ready. He’s shaking. “I’ve never… the state she was in, Mulder… she deserves better. From you.”

With that he leaves, and Mulder rages in silence. She seems fucking  _fine_  to him. Everyone seems fucking fine without him. Everything is falling to shit, but she will have diapers and onesies and fucking baby bottles filling her house while monsters light the world on fire. That was her choice. It’s her baby.

Alone is too much. He remembers the torture. He remembers screaming her name. And worst of all, he remembers some other version of himself that made love to her every chance he got. That teased her and touched her face while he kissed her and laughed when she rolled him under her so she could be on top. That loved her utterly. He’s angry at that man for abandoning them both. For dying on that ship and leaving him with nothing but this manic energy and displaced rage. He wants himself back.

So he tries. A little. He brings her a gift and takes her to the hospital when she hurts and orders her pizza and smiles like he’s supposed to—and she laughs and says kind things to him but he’s… Fuck. He’s not sure who he is or what he’s doing here. He touched her belly and felt something, but he didn’t recognize it. It made his head buzz. There’s a kid in there. Somebody’s kid. After pizza, she invites him to stay, but he tells her he can’t. He spends the night in the office, which smells different but looks the same. She kept this for him too: his photo of Samantha, his basketball, his photo of them. His chest hurts when he looks at it.

“You can’t send a pregnant woman,” he spits at Kersh, and he hears it in his own voice, the derision and resentment. He can’t even look at her for fear of what her expression might reveal. But of course that wasn’t the plan. Of course it’s this other man he’s sending. This interloper who doesn’t believe.

He will rage against it all on his own if he must. Or he will die again in his fight. Make it mean something this time. He flies out of town without even telling her. Twice in as many weeks, he hurls himself into mortal danger. Good. Good. If he dies again he won’t have to face it—the mountain of time he’s lost.

But after he’s dragged from the water, after he’s lost his badge and his gun and his phone (they’ll be taken from him anyway so who the fuck cares), after it all goes up in flame, he flies home soggy but she’s not there to greet him.

When he finds her in her apartment, she is cold like a morgue. He wants to ask if she is okay, but she won’t even look at him. She lets him in and sits on her couch, and something about her stillness frightens him.

“I’m okay,” he says.

She gives one slow nod, still staring at her coffee table.

“Scully.”

“What.”

“Look at me.”

“I can’t.”

“You can’t look at me?”

“No.”

If she won’t look at him, he’ll move himself into her line of sight. He sits on her coffee table and puts himself where her eyes are. Her face is empty: utterly without affect. There’s no Scully here at all.

“Dana,” he says, and that ignites something, some little fire that makes her jaw clench.

“Don’t.”

“They’ll fire me,” he says.

“Did you want to die?”

“I—“ but this catches him up short. He thinks about it but, “I don’t know.”

“Would you really rather be dead or in prison than off the X-Files?” Her voice is dead, robotic, her eyes still without focus. “Do I matter so little to you?”

“Scully, no, I… You—“ He wants to say that she is making it personal, but he remembers how disastrously that went once before, and he realizes how utterly wrong that is anyway, how cruel he must seem because he cannot even feel his own heartbeat, because he’s not entirely sure he’s alive, because she is  _everything_ —every last thing—that is personal to him, the entirety of his personhood, and he can’t fucking feel it anymore. All he can feel is adrenaline and drive and anger. Worst of all, he knows this now, can scream it at himself from a distance but not make himself hear or feel it. He knows that he is failing at being himself, and so he acts out his worst rendition of Fox Mulder, a crazed parody of who he was. He has no idea how to make her understand these things, so he tells her only, “I’m sorry,” while he shakes his head.

Finally, she tilts her chin up, meets his eyes, but she seems only a ghost. Broken. Her gaze is flat and wet and devoid of hope. “Mulder, when you first came back, you acted like I betrayed you by not being good enough for the X-Files. By not working hard enough. But I  _couldn’t_ , Mulder. I’d already almost—“ she stops herself, and he wonders what she’d almost done. “I couldn’t do any more than I did without hurting myself or the… and I was already so  _scared_ … And then you came back and you made me feel…” Her lips are trembling and there are tears now on her cheeks. They are doing something to him. They are burning him. “Jesus, do you know what that feels like, Mulder? To feel like you  _hate_  me for this? After all that I’ve…” but her voice breaks, and she stops to breathe. “I’m sorry I’m not you. I’m sorry I failed you. But I’m not sorry about this baby, Mulder.”

She has run him through with her blade. He is bleeding out on her carpet. The pain is unbearable: that she could think he… “Oh God,” he says. “Scully, no. Never. It’s not you.” It is like pins and needles in his heart: the pain is feeling coming back, and that feeling is shame. “Dana, no. I’m just… you seemed so—fuck, I thought you were…” He growls in frustration at his lack of words. “I’ll love this baby, Scully. No matter where it came from. If you want me to, I will love it like it’s mine. But I can’t promise… to be good at it.”

There’s a look of horror on her face, some dark realization, and her mouth falls open. “Oh,” she says.


	2. Chapter 2

Slowly, very slowly, she stands up and walks into the kitchen. He hears her moving things around, putting dishes away, running water, moving a kettle to the stove. After a moment, he follows.

“Scully.”

She doesn’t answer. There are still tears on her cheeks, but she ignores them, swipes angrily at them when they blur her vision. She fiddles with a box of tea bags and reaches down a mug—pauses for a moment, then pulls down a second.

“Scully,” he says again.

When she’s run out of small tasks, she turns around to face him and crosses her arms over her chest. He stands awkwardly at her kitchen table, hands resting on the back of a chair. Waiting.

“Mulder, where do you think this baby came from?”

Another jab—she goes right for the heart. “I—“ he begins, then shakes his head. “I don’t know, Scully. I thought maybe you…”

“That I what? That I went and did another round of IVF without you? After you were gone?” There’s such incredulity on her face that he’s ashamed for having thought it. Her brows are furrowed in such anguish.  _How dare you_ , they say.  _How could you possibly think that of me?_  And he wonders, too.

Mulder pulls out the chair he’s been leaning on and sits down. He drops his elbows to the table and his face into his hands. He’s so confused, and the feeling coming back to him  _hurts_.

“How then?” He asks into his palms.

“I have had every test possible, every scan and ultrasound, to be sure this baby is normal and healthy. I couldn’t…” she sighs. “I couldn’t trust my first amnio because the doctors were… I couldn’t trust them. And I couldn’t do a second one because I almost died the first time, and that’s probably what caused the abruption. But all the results are clear, Mulder. Every measurement, the timing, and my own body all say the same thing.”

He risks a peek between his fingers, afraid of what the answer might be. “Which is what?” He asks.

At that moment, the kettle screams from the stove, and Scully turns to pour the water into the mugs. With her back to him, she says, “This baby is completely normal and was conceived between the twenty-second and twenty-ninth of April.” She pauses a moment to let those dates sink in. He feels that sense of tingling again in his chest cavity, the surety that some enormous wave of agony and guilt is about to crash over him again. She carries the steaming mugs to the table and sets them down, lowers herself into the chair across from him. She looks him in the eyes, steely now with certainty. “Do you know what we were doing that last week in April?”

He watches her pained expression, the wet glass of her eyes. He chews on his bottom lip. He shakes his head, trying to recall that time Before.

“We’d spent two weeks on desk duty, because of your lungs. The beetles, remember?“ Her voice cracks on the question, and there’s such a sadness in how she looks at him: worry, maybe, that he doesn’t recall, that he’s forgotten what they were once. He remembers. “And then—“

“And then we flew to Los Angeles,” he says, realization creeping through him like icewater. Images come to him in quick succession:

_Scully putting on earrings in front of a mirror. “Mulder, do you see my headband in that bag?” But he can’t look away because she’s in that_ dress _and she’s so adorable, he wants to drag her back to the bed and forget about the premiere._

_Her champagne-drunk giggle in the back of a limousine as her head falls against his shoulder._

_Scenes from that terrible terrible movie: actors playing them badly, Skinner grinning at them from three rows ahead, so pleased with himself._

_But mostly. Mostly it’s Scully: naked both under him and over him, kissing her way down his chest, her breathy “Oh god, Mulder” when he enters her and she squeezes his ribs with her knees, the noises she lets herself make when she’s had a little bit to drink. Scully, asleep in the morning sunshine, sprawled naked across the hotel bed. Scully eating room-service fruit while wrapped in a sheet. Scully smiling at him under a curtain of messy hair._

It crushes him: the memory and the realization. “That…” But he can’t even bring himself to say it. It’s too much. It would mean too much.

“That was the week this baby was conceived, Mulder.” She’s dunking her tea bag instead of looking at him, which is good because he feels something cracking apart inside him. His fingertips feel numb, but the rest of him is on fire, burning back to life with every beat of his heart. Her words are a building building wave of something that’s coming for him, that will take him out. “I don’t have an explanation,” she says. “And I don’t have proof, because I don’t have the baby’s DNA yet.” She squeezes the teabag and sets it aside. “But of course the baby is yours, Mulder. I can’t believe you would think…” She shakes her head and a sad almost-smile grazes her lips. “At first I couldn’t wait to tell you. I thought you’d be so happy. I imagined how we’d…” She takes a quick, hitching breath. “And then I learned you were gone. And after everything, when you finally knew…” She doesn’t need to say it.

The wave crashes, crashes over him and he’s rolled over and trampled. His face falls into his hands again. He hadn’t let himself think it. His stupid jokes about the pizza man… Mulder feels a great wracking sob split him in half. He shakes with it. He can’t stop. “Oh god, Scully,” he manages to whimper into his hands again, doubled over. They’d made this baby. His own child, and he’d resented her for it. And even if it weren’t his child, he had  _no right_ … He hears her chair slide back, and a few seconds later, feels her hands on his shoulders, but he cannot turn to her. Not after what he’s done. What he’s felt. What he’s failed to feel.

She rubs his back and the audacity of her comfort breaks him again. He can’t help it, he turns to her, buries his face in her sweater, between her breasts and over the swell of her belly. “It’s okay,” she whispers, but he can’t stop shaking. Her fingers move through his hair, and he feels her sigh with the contact. “Oh, Mulder,” she says, voice thick with something. His arms come around her waist as best they can. She holds him tight, and they stay like that for long minutes, his face against her belly, her arms around his shoulders and over his back, moving up and down and into his hair. The pain ebbs finally, and in its place flows something once familiar—something that soothes, that holds them together. Love, maybe. This is  _his_  Scully, he thinks. He can do this.

When he can speak, he says, “I’m so sorry, Scully,” muffled, into her sweater. He feels her sigh, feels her grip him tighter for a moment.

“It’s okay,” she says. “You’re here. You came back. We’re all here.”

She brought him back, he thinks, because despite what she’s been through, she is always the strong one. “You’re too good for me,” he says, shaking his head. He kisses the fabric under his lips, then turns his face to rest his cheek on the soft swell. He feels a little shiver of movement. At first he thinks it’s her, but then realizes it’s the child moving, rolling or kicking or stretching its tiny limbs. He pulls back and looks at her. She touches his face, holds his jaw in her fingers.

“It’s alright,” she says. “Say something again,” she nods toward her belly.

Panic grips him. She wants him to say something to the baby. He feels… ill-equipped. What can he say? How could he possibly? He looks at her middle, and then at her face.

Scully must notice his panic because she shakes her head and steps back. Her hand falls from his cheek.

“Nevermind,” she says. “It’s okay.”

He’s losing his chance, he realizes. He feels it slipping away, and another kind of panic grips him. “No,” he says, and he pulls her back to him, places his lips smack on the roundest part of her belly and says, “Greetings from Earth.”

His words surprise her and she laughs. “Mulder—“

But it works and there’s another little shiver under his lips. Her laugh and the movement combined—they make him smile. There’s a bloom that other thing inside him. It’s a slow stream at first, an opening up, and then a full torrent of love spreading out into all his limbs from the center. This is what it’s like to feel again, he realizes. He brings his hands from her back to cup the rounded slope of her, to feel the gentle contour in as many places at once as he can with his own skin. “Earthling,” he says into the cotton, “I am your father.”


End file.
